Yes, Rexler, the man who wrote all those books on theater and cinema in Weimar
Germany, the author of Postwar Berlin and of the controversial study of Bertolt
Brecht. Quite an old man now and, it turns out, though you wouldn't have guessed
it from his work, physically handicapped-not disabled, only slightly crippled
in adolescence by infantile paralysis. You picture a tall man when you read
him, and his actual short, stooped figure is something of a surprise. You don't
expect the author of those swift sentences to have an abrupt neck, a long jaw,
and a knot-back. But these are minor items, and in conversation with him you
quickly forget his disabilities.

Because New York has been his base for half a century, it is assumed that
he comes from the East Side or Brooklyn. In fact he is a Canadian, born in Lachine,
Quebec, an unlikely birthplace for a historian who has written so much about
cosmopolitan Berlin, about nihilism, decadence, Marxism, national socialism,
and who described the trenches of World War I as "man sandwiches" served up
by the leaders of the great powers.

Yes, he was born in Lachine to parents from Kiev. His childhood was divided
between Lachine and Montreal. And just now, after a near-fatal illness, he had
had a curious desire or need to see Lachine again. For this reason he accepted
a lecture invitation from McGill University despite his waning interest in (and
a growing dislike for) Bertolt Brecht. Tired of Brecht and his Marxism-his Stalinism-he
stuck with him somehow. He might have canceled the trip. He was still convalescent
and weak. He had written to his McGill contact, "I've been playing hopscotch
at death's door, and since I travel alone I have to arrange for wheelchairs
between the ticket counter and the gate. Can I count on being met at Dorval?"

He counted also on a driver to take him to Lachine. He asked him to park the
Mercedes limo in front of his birthplace. The street was empty. The low brick
house was the only one left standing. All the buildings for blocks around had
been torn down. He told the driver, "I'm going to walk down to the river. Can
you wait for about an hour?" He anticipated correctly that his legs would soon
tire and that the empty streets would be cold, too. Late October was almost
wintry in these parts. Rexler was wearing his dark-green cloaklike Salzburg
loden coat.

There was nothing familiar to see at first, you met no people here. You were
surprised by the bigness and speed of the St. Lawrence. As a kid you were hemmed
in by the dinky streets. The river now had opened up, and the sky also, with
long static autumn clouds. The rapids were white, the water reeling over the
rocks. The old Hudson's Bay Trading Post was now a community center. Opposite,
in gloomy frames of moss and grime, there stood a narrow provincial stone church.
And hadn't there been a convent nearby? He did not look for it. Downriver he
made out Caughnawaga, the Indian reservation, on the far shore. According to
Parkman, a large party of Caughnawaga Mohawks, crossing hundreds of miles on
snowshoes, had surprised and massacred the settlers of Deerfield, Massachusetts,
during the French-Indian wars. Weren't those Indians Mohawks? He couldn't remember.
He believed that they were one of the Iroquois nations. For that matter he couldn't
say whether his birthplace was on Seventh Avenue or on Eighth. So many landmarks
were gone. The tiny synagogue had become a furniture warehouse. There were neither
women nor children in the streets. Immigrant laborers from the Dominion Bridge
Company once had lived in the cramped houses. From the narrow front yard (land
must have been dear), where Rexler's mother more than seventy years ago had
set him cross-strapped in his shawl to dig snow with the black stove shovel,
you could see the wide river surface-it had been there all the while, beyond
the bakeries and sausage shops, kitchens and bedrooms.

Beside the Lachine Canal, where the "kept" water of the locks was still and
green, various reasons for Rexler's return began to take shape. When asked how
he was doing-and it was only two months ago that the doctors had written him
off; the specialist had told him, "Your lungs were whited out. I wouldn't have
given two cents for your life"-Rexler answered, "I have no stamina. I put out
some energy and then I can't bend down to tie my shoelaces."

Why then did he take this trying trip? Was it sentimentality, was it nostalgia?
Did he want to recall how his mother, mute with love, had bundled him in woolens
and set him down in the snow with a small shovel? No, Rexler wasn't at all like
that. He was a tough-minded man. It was toughness that had drawn him decades
ago to Bert Brecht. Nostalgia, subjectivism, inwardness-all that was in the
self-indulgence doghouse now. But he was making no progress toward an answer.
At his age the reprieve from death could be nothing but short. It was noteworthy
that the brick and stucco that had walled in the Ukrainian-, Sicilian-, and
French-Canadian Dominion Bridge Company laborers also cut them off from the
St. Lawrence in its platinum rush toward the North Atlantic. To have looked
at their bungalows again wouldn't have been worth the fatiguing trip, the wear
and tear of airports, the minor calvary of visiting-lecturer chitchat.

Anyway, he saw death as a magnetic field that every living thing must enter.
He was ready for it. He had even thought that since he had been unconscious
under the respirator for an entire month, he might just as well have died in
the hospital and avoided further trouble. Yet here he was in his birthplace.
Intensive-care nurses had told him that the electronic screens monitoring his
heart had run out of graphs, squiggles, and symbols at last and, foundering,
flashed out nothing but question marks. That would have been the way to go,
with all the machines confounded, from unconsciousness to nonconsciousness.
But it wasn't over yet, and now this valetudinarian native son stood in Monkey
Park beside the locks shadowed with the autumn green of the banked earth and
asked himself whether all this was a justified expense of his limited energy.

The cook, she's nam' was Rosie

She cam' from Mo'real

And was chambermaid on a lumber barge

In the Grand Lachine Canal.

Rexler had more than once thought of opening an office to help baffled people
who could remember only one stanza of a ballad or song. For a twenty-five-dollar
fee you would provide the full text.

He remembered that when a barge was in the locks, the Lachinois, loafing unemployed
or killing time, would chat or joke with the crew. He had been there himself,
waving and grinning at the wisecracks. His boy's body was clean then. As such
things are reckoned he had still been normal during his final childhood holiday
in Lachine. Toward the end of that summer he came down with polio and his frame
was contorted into a monkey puzzle. Next, adolescence turned him into a cripple
gymnast whose skeleton was the apparatus he worked out on like an acrobat in
training. This was how reality punished you for your innocence. It turned you
into a crustacean. But in his early years, until the end of the twenties, his
body was still well formed and smooth. Then his head grew heavy, his jawline
lengthened, his sideburns were thick pillars. But he had taken pains to train
himself away from abnormality, from the outlook and the habits of a cripple.
His long eyes were mild. He walked with a virile descending limp, his weight
coming down on the advancing left foot. "Not personally responsible for the
way life operates" was what he tacitly declared.

This, more or less, was Rexler, the last of the tribe that had buzzed across
the Atlantic early in the century and found limited space in streets that shut
out the river. They lived among the French, the Indians, the Sicilians, and
the Ukrainians.

His aunt Rozzy, who was fond of him, often rescued him in July from the St.
Dominick Street slum in Montreal. His older cousins in Lachine, already adults,
all with witty strong faces, seemed to like his company. "Take the boy with
you," Aunt Rozzy would say when she dispatched them on errands.

He tooted all over Lachine with them in their cars and trucks.

These were solid detailed recollections, nothing dreamlike about them. Rexler
knew therefore that he must have come back to them repeatedly over many years.
Again and again the cousins, fully mature at twenty, or even at sixteen. The
eldest, Cousin Ezra, was an insurance adjuster. Next in age was Albert, a McGill
law student. And then Matty, less tough than his big brothers. The youngest
was Reba. She had the odor stout girls often have, Rexler used to think-a distinctive
sexy scent. They were all, for that matter, sexy people. Except, of course,
the parents. But Ezra and Albert, even Matty, varied their business calls with
visits to girls. They joked with them in doorways. Sometimes with a Vadja, sometimes
a Nadine. Ezra, who was so stern about business, buying and trading building
lots-the insurance was a sideline-would laugh after he had cranked his Ford
and say as he jumped into the seat, "How did you like that one, Robbie?" And,
playful, he surprised Rexler by gripping his thigh. Ezra had a leathery pleasant
face. His complexion, like his father's, was dark and he had vertical furrows
under each ear; an old country doctor had cured him surgically of swellings
caused by milk from a tubercular cow. But even the scars were pleasant to see.
Ezra had an abrupt way of clearing his nose by snorting. He trod the pedals
of the Ford. His breath was virile-a little salty or perhaps sour. Over Rexler
he had great seniority-more an uncle than a cousin. And when Ezra was silent,
having business thoughts, all laughing was shut down. He brought his white teeth
together and a sort of gravity came over him. No Yiddish jokes then, or Hebrew
with double meanings. He was a determined man out to make good. At his death
he left an estate in the millions.

Rexler had never visited his grave or the graves of the others. They all lay
together somewhere on a mountainside-Westmount, would that be, or Outremont?
Ezra and Albert quarreled when Reba died. Ezra had been away and Albert buried
her in a remote cemetery. "I want my dead together." Ezra was angry at what
he saw as disrespect to the parents. Rexler, recalling this, made a movement
of his crippled back, shrugging off the piety. It was not his cup of tea. But
then why did he recall it so particularly?

On a June day he had gone in the car with Albert across the Grand Trunk tracks
where the parents owned rental property. They had been here no more than fifteen
years and they didn't know twenty words of the language, yet they were buying
property. Only the immediate family were in on this. They were secretive. At
Rexler's age-seven or eight years old-he wouldn't have understood. But when
he was present they were guarded nevertheless. As a result, he did come to understand.
Such a challenge was sure to provoke him.

Cousin Albert put you off with his shrewd look of amusement. For women he
had a lewd eye. And at McGill he had picked up a British manner. He said "By
Jove." He also said "Topping." Joe Cohen, an MP in Ottawa, had chosen Albert
to be a student clerk. Clerking for Joe Cohen, he was made. In time he would
become a partner in Cohen's firm. He'll stop saying "By Jove," and say instead
"What's the deal?" was Cousin Ezra's true prophecy. But Ezra had airs of his
own. The look of the firstborn, for example. A few thousand years of archaic
gravity would settle on him. The advantage of being in remote Lachine was that
he could freely improvise from the Old Testament.

Anyway, Rexler was in the family's second Ford with Albert on the far side
of the tracks, over toward Dorval, and Albert parked in front of a large bungalow.
It had a spacious white porch, round pillars, and a swing hanging on chains.

"I have to go in," said Albert. "I'll be a while."

"Long?"

"As long as it takes."

"Can I go out and walk back and forth?"

"I'd like you to stay in the auto."

He went in, Rexler remembered, and the wait was interminable. The sun came
through the June leaves. Dark periwinkle grew in all the shady places and young
women came and went on the broad porch. They walked arm in arm or sat together
on the swing or in white wooden Adirondack chairs. Rexler moved into the driver's
seat and played with the wheel and the choke-or was it the spark lever? Crouching,
he worked the pedals with his hands. A cloven hoof would be a good fit on the
ovals of the clutch and brake.

Then it became tiresome to wait.

Then Rexler was fretful.

He might have been alone for as long as an hour.

Did he, Rexler now wondered, have any idea as to what was keeping Albert?
He may have had. All those young women passing through the screen door, promenading,
swinging between the creaking chains.

Without haste Albert stepped between the green plots to the Ford. Smiling,
a pretense of regret in his look, he said, "There was more business to do than
usual." He mentioned a lease. Baloney, of course. It wasn't what he said but
how he spoke that mattered. He had a lippy sort of look and somehow, to Rexler,
his mouth had become an index: lippy, but the eyes were at variance with the
lower face. Those eyes reflected the will of an upper power center. This was
Rexler's early manner of observation. His eagerness, his keenness for this had
weakened with time and, in his seventies, he did not care about Albert's cunning,
his brothels, his secret war against his brother Ezra.

At the first candy store Albert parked the Ford and gave Rexler a copper two-cent
piece-a helmeted woman with a trident and shield. With this coin Rexler bought
two porous squares of blond molasses candy. He understood that he was being
bribed, though he couldn't have explained exactly why. He would not in any case
have said a word to Aunt Rozzy about the house with all the girls. Such outside
street things never were reported at home. He chewed the candy to a fine dust
while Albert entered a cottage to make the rent collection for his mother. Not
a thing a university man liked doing. Although where money came from didn't
much matter.

Albert was in a better humor when he came out and gave little Rexler a joyride
through the pastures and truck gardens, turning back just short of Dorval. Returning,
they saw a small crowd at the level crossing of the Grand Trunk. There had been
an accident. A man had been killed by a fast train. The tracks had not yet been
cleared and for the moment a line of cars was held up and Rexler, standing on
the running board of the Model T, was able to see-not the corpse, but his organs
on the roadbed-first the man's liver, shining on the white, egg-shaped stones,
and a little beyond it his lungs. More than anything, it was the lungs-Rexler
couldn't get over the twin lungs crushed out of the man by the train when it
tore his body open. Their color was pink and they looked inflated still. Strange
that there should be no blood, as if the speed of the train had scattered it.

Albert didn't have the curiosity to find out who the dead man was. He must
not have wanted to ask. The Ford had stopped running and he set the spark and
jumped down to crank it again. When the engine caught, the fender shuddered
and then the file of cars crept over the planks. The train was gone-nothing
but an empty track to the west.

"So, where did you get lost such a long time?" said Aunt Rozzy.

Albert said, "A man was killed at the Grand Trunk crossing."

That was answer enough.

Rexler was sent down to the garden in the yard to pick tomatoes. Even more
than the fruit itself, the vines and leaves carried the strong tomato odor.
You could smell it on your fingers. Uncle Mikhel had staked the plants and bound
them with strips of cloth torn from old petticoats and undershirts. Though his
hands were palsied, Uncle Mikhel could weed and tie knots. His head, too, made
involuntary movements but his eyes looked at you steadily, wide open. His face
was tightly held by the close black beard. He said almost nothing. You heard
the crisping of his beard against the collar oftener than his voice. He stared,
you expected him to say something; instead he went on staring with an involuntary
wag of the head. The children had a great respect for him. Rexler remembered
him with affection. Each of his olive-brown eyes had a golden flake on it like
the scale of a smoked fish. If his head went back and forth it was not because
he was denying anything, he was warding off a tremor.

"Why doesn't the boy eat?" Aunt Rozzy said to Albert at dinner. "Did he let
you stuff yourself with candy?"

"Why aren't you eating your soup, Robbie?" Albert asked. His smile was narrow.
Albert was not at all afraid that he, Rexler, would mention the girls on the
porch swing or his long wait in the car. And even if something were to slip
out, it would be no more than his mother already suspected.

"I'm just not hungry."

Shrewd Albert smiled even more narrowly at the boy, bearing down on him. "I
think it was the accident that took away his appetite. A man was killed on the
tracks as we were coming home."

"God in heaven," said Aunt Rozzy.

"He burst open," said Albert. "We came to a stop and there were his insides-heart,
liver...."

His lungs! The lungs reminded Rexler of the water wings used by children learning
to swim.

"Who was the man?"

"A drunkard," said Aunt Rozzy.

Uncle Mikhel interrupted. "He may have been a railway worker."

Out of respect for the old man no more was said, for Uncle Mikhel was once
a CPR laborer. He had been a conscript on the eastern front during the Russian
war with Japan. He deserted, reached western Canada somehow, and for years was
employed by the railroad, laying tracks. He saved his groschen, as he liked
to say, and sent for his family. And now, surrounded by grown sons, he was a
patriarch at his own table in his own huge kitchen with large oil paintings
out of the junk shop hanging on the walls. There were baskets of fruit, sheep
in the fold, and Queen Victoria with her chin resting on her wrist.

Cousin Albert had turned things around with sparkling success and seemed to
be saying to little Rexler, "See how it's done?"

But Rexler was transfixed by the chicken soup. As a treat, Aunt Rozzy had
served him the gizzard. It had been opened by her knife so that it showed two
dense wings ridged with lines of muscle, brown and gray at the bottom of the
dish. He had often watched the hens upside down, hanging by trussed feet, first
fluttering, then more gently quivering as they bled to death. The legs too went
into the soup.

Aunt Rozzy, his father's sister, had the family face but her look was more
sharp and severe by far. There was nothing so red as her nose in zero weather.
She had cruelly thick legs and her hindquarters were wildly overdeveloped, so
that walking must have been a torment. She certainly did not put herself out
to be loved, for she was wicked to everyone. Except, perhaps, little Rexler.

"Did you see what happened? What did you see?"

"The man's heart."

"What else?"

"His liver, and the lungs."

Those spongy soft swelled ovals patched pink and red.

"And the body?" she said to Albert.

"Maybe dragged by the train," he said, unsmiling this time.

Aunt Rozzy lowered her voice and said something about the dead. She was fanatically
Orthodox. Then she told Rexler that he didn't have to eat his dinner. She was
not a lovable woman, but the boy loved her and she was aware of it. He loved
them all. He even loved Albert. When he visited Lachine he shared Albert's bed,
and in the morning he would sometimes stroke Albert's head, and not even when
Albert fiercely threw off his hand did he stop loving him. The hair grew in
close rows, row after row.

These observations, Rexler was to learn, were his whole life-his being-and
love was what produced them. For each physical trait there was a corresponding
feeling. Paired, pair by pair, they walked back and forth, in and out of his
soul.

Aunt Rozzy had the face, the fiery face of a hanging judge, and she was determined
to fix the blame for the accident on the victim. The dead man himself. And Rexler,
walking in Monkey Park and beginning to feel the strain of his excursion, the
weakness of his legs, sat down with the experienced delicacy of a cripple on
the first bench he came to.

Cousin Reba, always ready to disagree with her mother, said, "We can't assume
he was drunk. He may have been absentminded." But Aunt Rozzy with an even more
flaming face seemed to believe that if he was innocent his death was all the
more deserved. She sounded like Bertolt Brecht when he justified the murder
of Bukharin. The one thing to be proud of, according to the playwright, the
only true foundation of self-respect, was not to be taken in by illusions and
sentiments. The only items in the book of rules were dead items. If you didn't
close the book, if you still harked back to the rules, you deserved to die.

How deep can the life of a modern man be? Very deep, if he is hard enough
to see innocence as a fault, if, as Brecht held, he wipes out the oughts which
the gullible still buy and expels pity from politics.

The destruction of the dwarf brick houses opened the view of the river, as
huge as a plain, but swift nevertheless, and this restoration of things as they
had been when first seen by explorers opened Rexler himself to an unusual degree,
so that he began to consider how desirable it could be to settle nearby so that
he might see it every day-to buy or rent, to have a view of the rapids and the
steely speed ... why not? He was a native son, and he had no present attachments
in New York. But he knew this was an impracticable fancy. He could not (for
how long?) spend his final years with no more company than the river. Since
giving up his Brecht studies, he had no occupation. Brecht was light on the
subject of death. If he was to live with Stalinism this lightness was essential.
Hence the joys of the knife, as in "Mackie Messer," so many years on the hit
parade. All that pre-Hitler Weimar stuff. It was Stalin, whom Brecht had backed,
who should have won in 1932. But Rexler did not intend to go public with such
views. He was too ill, too old to make enemies. If he turned polemical the intelligentsia
would be sure to say that he was a bitter aging hunchback. No, for him it was
private life from now on.

He didn't want to think about the books and articles that had made his Lachine
cousins so proud of him. "Just look how Robbie overcame the polio and made something
of himself," Cousin Ezra would tell his growing children.

But toward the end, dying of leukemia, Ezra greeted Rexler by throwing his
arms wide. He sat up in his hospital bed and exclaimed, "A maloch has walked
into my room." His color was his father's exactly-very dark and with pleasant
folds, and he had become the Old Testament patriarch through and through-an
Abraham bargaining with the Lord God to spare Sodom and Gomorrah or buying the
cave of Machpelah to bury his wife.

"Angel," Ezra said with delicacy because of the mound on Rexler's back: not
exactly a pair of folded wings. The truth at that time was that Rexler looked
like one of the cast of a Brecht-Kurt Weill production: hands sunk in his trousers'
pockets and his skeptical head-it was too heavy, it listed-needing cleverly
poised feet to support it. His hair was gray, something like the color of drying
oregano. What did his dying cousin make of him, of his reputation as a scholar
and a figure in New York theatrical circles? Rexler had gone against the mainstream
in the arts, and his radical side was the side that had won.

All those years of error, as it now seemed to Rexler. Hands clasped behind
his back he tramped, limped, along the Lachine Canal, thinking that his dying
cousin Ezra gave him high marks for his struggle against paralysis.